These Blackwater videos taken in Iraq are appalling. I’m not sure which one is the worst, but running over a women and just continuing on without so much as radioing for help has to be up there.
Remember- they hate us for our freedom.
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: War, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Sociopaths
These Blackwater videos taken in Iraq are appalling. I’m not sure which one is the worst, but running over a women and just continuing on without so much as radioing for help has to be up there.
Remember- they hate us for our freedom.
by DougJ| 64 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
Austerity is destroying the Spanish middle-class:
Here’s just a brief summary of the ugly statistics: (1) The government in Madrid expects the economy to shrink by 1.7% in 2012 – its third contraction in four years. (2) Unemployment continues to rise. It is now more than 23%, and youth unemployment is above a staggering 50%. (3) Housing prices are down 22% from their peak, and are likely to continue to drop, perhaps by 20% or more. This puts extreme pressure on the balance sheets of an already shaky banking sector.
Obviously, this is an economy in severe distress. And what is the government’s response? More growth-killing austerity. In late March, it announced its most severe package of tax hikes and budget cuts yet, aiming to reduce the deficit by $36 billion. What gives? Madrid is extremely worried about the state of its national finances. It missed its deficit target in 2011, and, without the latest austerity package, would have done so again in 2012.
However, the austerity drive is failing to achieve what it aims to do: improve Spain’s financial position and rebuild investor confidence. Instead, investors have been spooked by the deterioration of the Spanish economy. Demand for Spanish government bonds was weak in a Wednesday auction. Since the government announced its latest austerity budget, yields on its bonds have risen, a sign that investors see them as riskier. Yields on 10-year bonds jumped over 5.6%, the highest since January. And why is that? Well, by tanking the economy, the austerity measures are making Spain’s financial standing weaker, not stronger. Despite its new austerity budget, Madrid estimates that the government-debt-to-GDP ratio will INCREASE in 2012, to nearly 80% from 68.5% in 2011. Simply put, Spain is moving backwards.
Cheer up, though, sooner or later, Spain will have a better-than-expected quarterly GDP number and Bobo will start talking about the “Spanish miracle” and what we can learn from it.
Dr. Maddow’s central premise is that the nature of the American national security apparatus, and particularly the manner by which the nation goes to war and fights wars has, in the latter half of the 20th century, diverted from the original vision of the founders, to the detriment of the country and our democratic experiment. It’s a premise with which I agree wholeheartedly, and in Drift, The Unmooring of American Military Power, I have finally found a cogent, concise articulation of that belief, as well as a prescription to cure the sick. In their zeal to limit executive power, the founders particularly granted power to declare war to the legislative branch, as they thought that the political and emotional need of the executive in particular, and the nation as whole, would prove too tempting were it easily doable. She briefly discusses the end of the war in Viet Nam, and she notes the work of General Creighton Abrams, who had commanded US forces in Viet Nam and later, from 1972 to his death in 1974 served as Army Chief of Staff and restructured the Army to force subsequent presidents and congresses to have to deal with the political fallout of war by making it impossible to go to war without using the Reserve and National Guard forces and thereby making members of congress more directly involved. It was one thing for President Johnson to keep raising the number of draftees, and thereby killing and maiming hometown boys one by one, but another thing entirely for a congressman to contemplate twenty boys from his district being killed in one day.
She discusses briefly how President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger despised General Abrams “he had his chance to win a war and he blew it” and how Nixon and his lackeys, including his White House chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and later Ford’s chief of staff Dick Cheney (Yes, you’re going to see these names over and over again,) held the position that “when the president does something, something on national security, that means it’s not illegal.”
She goes deeply into the weeds on the Reagan presidency, and his obsession with using military force, and operating foreign relations unchecked by congressional oversight. She gives a point by point recitation of the major events of the Iran-Contra affair and describes the intellectual underpinnings, first articulated by then-Attorney General Edwin Meese in his legal contortionist act to exonerate the President, of the theory of the Unitary Executive and the first defense of that theory by then-congressman Dick Cheney of Wyoming. You would be forgiven if, by the middle of the book, you start to read it as a bill of indictment against the Republican party’s leading lights of the last forty years with a few snarky sideways comments. Even as Maddow doesn’t write as a polemicist but with a cool, simple factual walk-through of events, you still can’t help but feel your anger start to rise a bit at what they’ve done. And the book is better and more effective for the simple, and at times light touch.
Reading Drift, I am left with the feeling that nobody gets out clean. In the run-up to the first Iraq war, congress abrogated their responsibility by first not fighting President Bush hard enough on the issue of war powers and later by kicking the can down the road to after the start of hostilities. As one unnamed Republican senator said “a lot of people here want it both ways. If it works, they want to be with the president. If not, they want to be against him.” She continues with the rise of the contractors, a necessity created by Dick Cheney’s post-cold war/Desert Storm restructuring of the military in such a way that major logistical and support functions that had been by uniformed personnel were eliminated from the end strength as a way to preserve pure combat power. If the service top line is 400,000 personnel, better to get rid of the people who only wash laundry, and only during war, and keep those slots filled with riflemen. Less money spent in peacetime that way, and only spending money during war. That was the promise, anyway. The result was that Presidents Clinton, and Bush II used contracting to replace people. Contractors may be horrendously expensive when you use them, but they are outside oversight, and they finally free the executive from that last fetter on the use of military power, General Abrams’ force structure. The DoD isn’t responsible for what employees of a contractor do. And the DoD doesn’t have to explain anything when contractor employees are killed and wounded either, for that matter.
Drift is at its best when it describes the macro trends that have really shaped the American way of war in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the politics that both created and responded to those pressures. Where it falls down is when Maddow gets into the details of military doctrine, operations, and policy. Her discussion of FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, seems written by somebody who doesn’t really understand what doctrine is, or how it is developed and used. Similarly, her discussion of the nuclear weapons complex, particularly the US Air Force’s issues with the safety and accountability of nuclear weapons and components is limited by either an inability or an unwillingness to get deep into the subject. Either of these subjects could themselves occupy the full 275 pages of the book, but as Maddow is not a specialist in either field, one can forgive the glossing-over, especially as she gets the salient points, that the Army cannot properly forge doctrine in a vacuum of civilian leadership, and that we have far too many nuclear warheads and delivery systems for any remotely realistic threat, correct. Her epilogue is perhaps the most important piece of writing on civil-military relations of the last ten years.
There was only one mistake of fact that jumped out at me, and it seems a fact checker/copy editor function–pg 111, “Those Marines on his national security staff–Bud McFarlane, John Poindexter, and Oliver North…” John Poindexter was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy. A couple of pages later, she again refers to Poindexter as a Marine “The Attorney General [Meese] threw the Marines–McFarlane, North, and John Poindexter–to the wolves.”
Overall, I thought that it was exceptional. As I said earlier, nobody gets out clean. She takes the Obama administration to task for the growing use of drone aircraft and CIA operations that are not subject to congressional scrutiny. The implication for us all is that we, all of us, are responsible for how our country’s military is used in this world, how it is constructed, trained, equipped, managed, deployed, and most especially how and when it fights wars for this country.
Also, I too have an autographed copy to give away. I haven’t decided how to do that yet. Probably will start another thread just like Anne Laurie’s giveaway. That won’t happen until tomorrow, at the earliest.
Drift Kindle edition
http://www.amazon.com/Drift-Unmooring-American-Military-ebook/dp/B005BUG6T8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1332854823&sr=8-3
Drift NOOK book
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/drift-rachel-maddow/1104511240?ean=9780307461001&itm=1&usri=drift+rachel+maddow
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As of 7:30pm, there were 618 entries total — 440 in Contest Thread #1, 177 in Thread #2, and one emailer whose posts weren’t showing up on the site. Random.org selected comment #580.
Commenter Evap, please email me at AnneLaurie @ verizon.net (direct link via the Contact list, to the right) with your mailing address!
Thanks to all who participated (yes, I read every comment, so your jokes did not go to waste). Newbies, welcome to our virtual Place Where Everybody Knows Your Nym, don’t hesitate to jump into the conversation again!
Those who were waiting can now order their own copies of Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power in paper, Kindle, or Audible formats. Our own Mistermix has a review here (spoiler: he liked it).
Here’s an excerpt from the Terry Gross interview on NPR:
Maddow’s new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power traces how U.S. national intelligence agencies have taken over duties that were once assigned to the military, and how this shift has increased the public disconnect from the consequences of war.
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“Politically, secrecy is a great excuse,” Maddow tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that’s a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that’s a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public.”
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That lack of accountability, says Maddow, lets America’s national defense operate without public oversight or knowledge.
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“When things are done in secret in our name, we can be held accountable for them, even if we can’t hold accountable our government for directing it,” she says. “And that feels very un-American to me.”…
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, War, Bring on the Brawndo!, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
James Fallows pointed me to this depressingly smart piece by Stephen M. Walt, up now at the Foreign Policy website. Walt gives us 10 lessons we should learn from our Iraq fiasco, from number 1 — we lost — through the point Fallows highlights, number 3, in which we learn what happens when the political and media Villages rush to outdo each other in feckless groupthink and morally bankrupt cheerleading folly.*
Because it is not clear if any U.S. approach would have succeeded at an acceptable cost, the real lesson of Iraq is not to do stupid things like this again.
The U.S. military has many virtues, but it is not good at running other countries. And it is not likely to get much better at it with practice. We have a capital-intensive army that places a premium on firepower, and we are a country whose own unusual, melting-pot history has made us less sensitive to the enduring power of nationalism, ethnicity, and other local forces.
Furthermore, because the United States is basically incredibly secure, it is impossible to sustain public support for long and grinding wars of occupation. Once it becomes clear that we face a lengthy and messy struggle, the American people quite properly begin to ask why we are pouring billions of dollars and thousands of lives into some strategic backwater. And they are right.
So my last lesson is that we shouldn’t spend too much time trying to figure out how to do this sort of thing better, because we’re never going to do it well and it will rarely be vital to our overall security. Instead, we ought to work harder on developing an approach to the world that minimizes the risk of getting ourselves into this kind of war again.
In between Walt’s insistence that we honestly confront our loss in Iraq and this rather pious last hope, this short essay examines many important, depressing truths. Read the whole thing. We’ll need to keep reminding selves and others of these desperately hard-won realizations, given that the usual suspects, only to willing to spend somebody else’s blood, are urging us into the next war.
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/5vUDmFjWgVo” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
(And yes. I know I’ve posted this tune before. You gonna make something of it?)
*No matter how often I watch the Mustache of Understanding talk about “American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Bagdad,” his faux-macho willingness to send other folks kids to blow up still other folks and their kids makes me mouth vomit.
Image: Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, (attr.) Laughing Fool, c. 1500.
[Cross posted at The Inverse Square Blog]
Things To Think About Before We Blow Sh*t UpPost + Comments (62)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Republican Stupidity, Clown Shoes
The GOP candidates have no savvy or sophistication whatsoever:
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev tweaked Mitt Romney for his characterization of Russia as the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States, saying the comments did not reflect the current relationship between the two countries.
“It is very reminiscent of Hollywood and also of a certain phase in Russian-U.S. relations,” Medvedev said at the end of the nuclear security summit in South Korea Tuesday.
Romney made the comment to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday while criticizing President Barack Obama over his open mic moment a day earlier.
“In terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, and as of course a massive nuclear power, Russia is the geopolitical foe,” Romney said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “The idea that our president is planning on doing something with them that he’s not willing to tell the American people before the election is something I find very, very alarming.”
Medvedev urged Romney to take the current climate into account if he hopes to win the presidential election.
“My first advice is to listen to reason when they formulate their positions. Reason never harmed a presidential candidate,” Medvedev said. “My other advice is to check their watches from time to time: it is 2012, not the mid-1970s.”
For wingnuts, we’ve been stuck in Red Dawn since 1945.
by Zandar| 46 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, War
Looks like Bashar al-Assad is ready to deal.
The Syrian government has accepted U.N. envoy Kofi Annan’s plan to forge peace and end violence, Annan’s spokesman said on Tuesday.
Annan has offered Syria a six-point plan – supported by the U.N. Security Council – as a way to halt the violence.
The proposal seeks to stop the violence and the killing, give access to humanitarian agencies, release detainees, and start an inclusive political dialogue to address the legitimate aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people, according to a U.N. statement.
Hey look. Smart power and stuff. It’s like it works or something, and that there are ugly foreign policy problems that can be solved without blowing things up. Can’t wait until the usual suspects tell us how awesome the United Nations suddenly is, and that President Whatshisface had nothing to do with this.